OBVS: "People Look Better When You Drink"

The "No Fucking Way" file is getting quite overloaded, but at least now there is scientific confirmation for the reason dudes kick game to me at La Cita but not at Amoeba or Trader Joe's. Frowny face.

People Really Do Look Better When You Drink
by Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

"For the first time, scientists have proven that "beer goggles" are real — other people really do look more attractive to us if we have been drinking.

Surprisingly, the beer goggles effect was not limited to just the opposite sex among the ostensibly straight volunteers recruited for the study — they also rated people from their own sex as more attractive.

Scientists in England gave 84 heterosexual college students chilled lime-flavored drinks that were either non-alcoholic or given a dose of vodka equivalent in alcohol to a large glass of wine or a pint-and-a-half of beer.

After 15 minutes, the volunteers were shown photos of 40 other college students from both sexes. Both men and women who drank booze found these faces more attractive, "a roughly 10 percent increase in ratings of attractiveness," said researcher Marcus Munafo, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol in England.

The researchers also asked volunteers to rate their mood, "and there were no differences on those measures in the alcohol group compared to the no-alcohol group," Munafo added. "This suggests that the effect we observed wasn't due to a general change in mood."

...

The discovery that the effect is not specific to the opposite sex was surprising. One possibility is that alcohol generally makes us see things as more attractive, but when this occurs in social situations, such as at a bar, "this might become targeted at opposite-sex faces," Munafo said. By repeating the experiment with video clips shot at bars, the scientists hope to recreate those social cues and see what happens.

"The main question is whether these effects are specific to faces, or whether we would rate anything as more attractive after a drink," Munafo said.

Future research could expose people who have been drinking to landscapes or the faces of puppies and other animals, "to see if alcohol has a more general effect on perceiving beauty in the environment.""

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